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For our final class meeting, students brought
in stories from domestic and international online newspapers about September
11th related current events. They brought in a review of an anti-drug
advertising campaign, a story about building a temporary memorial in New
York, an account from a Scottish newspaper about the mourning of local
victims, stories from Arab news services designed to elicit outrage about
alleged human rights violations in "Camp X-ray" in Guatanamo bay, and an
item about responses to the growing crisis in the Middle East from the
electronic version of one student's "hometown" newspaper from her year
as an exchange student in Spain.
Online international news services present significant
opportunities for composition instructors to explore "global rhetorics"
with a class and the structure of national and international logics
of news and editorial content. In this particular case, pathos was emphasized in
many of their choices. Students argued that even the most explicitly
informational "news" content relies on appeals to emotion.
Ironically, through our discussion of the emotional
appeals of news in international contexts, students found themselves coming
back to the emotional appeal of news in the domestic context, an area that
many students considered subtext before taking the course.
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